Lord British wants to take you to space, and he’s closer than you think

Richard Garriott has been to space, but it took his fortune, a few major …

It is very easy to fall asleep in space. When you're at your desk at home and you've been working for hours and you nod off, your chin bumps your chest and you wake up with a start. In space, your head doesn't fall—you simply fade into sleep, and then if you're unattached you begin to float away. This is the sort of thing you hear when you speak with Richard Garriott, a man you may know better as Lord British. He made millions of dollars creating and selling video games, and then spent most of that money trying to get into space.

He says that there is no ground on the International Space Station, nor is there a ceiling. There are instruments and items and all sorts of things connected to the walls, and you can tell the people who are new to space flight by how they bump into things, which sends them spinning in zero gravity. They zoom around, followed by a mess of items and benign, space-faring shrapnel. It collects by the air vents if no one picks it up. Sleeping bodies find their way there as well.

This is where Richard Garriott wants to take you, and he is much closer than you think.

Flying poets

It's hard not to romanticize a man like Richard Garriott. His father was an astronaut, and only poor eyesight stopped the son from following the father off the planet. He began working with computers, and created the games many of us grew up playing. In some circles the name "Avatar" has nothing to do with James Cameron, and everything to do with our adventures in Britannia. We remember when he was killed by his own people.

This is how Richard Garriott speaks when describing what it was like to fly into space on the Soyuz rocket: "You know, unlike television where it's always loud and has lots of vibration or you might imagine it feels like a dropping the clutch on the sports car as you take off at a green light, it's actually much more cerebral," he explains. "It's almost perfectly smooth. It's almost perfectly silent and feels much more like a confident ballet move, lifting you ever faster into the sky, than something scary or threatening."

This is in stark contrast to the vision of space flight we've been sold, the violent and overwhelming cacophony of the liftoff, as if man was by his very will pushing the Earth away from himself. The way Garriott explains liftoff, it's simply man taking his rightful place in the heavens.

Returning to Earth is also different than you'd imagine. There is almost perfect silence as you hit the atmosphere at 17,000 miles an hour. "That creates plasma around the vehicle that is hotter than the surface of the sun. Literally, my right shoulder was against that window," he told us. "And that window is, you know, about five panes of glass and quartz and a few other things. There is a gap in the window that's a vacuum, and that's why the material doesn't melt."

The Earth, near sunset

This is where Garriott sat as he fell back to Earth, intellectually aware that a few inches away was something that hot and that ferocious. If something were to go wrong, he would have to go to work. He knew the craft as well as the other astronauts next to him, as there is no such thing as a passenger seat in space; you have to work if you want to go up. He spent months in Russia learning how to do this, and he knows that until they touch down on land, not water, there is radio silence. The reason for this is disturbing: if you're speaking when you hit land, you're likely to bite through your own tongue.

The landing did not go smoothly, as debris was knocked loose and kept his seat from operating normally. Smoke began to pour into the capsule from under one of the instrument panels, a moment Garriott referred to as being "a little alarming."

"When you hit the ground, even under a big parachute like that, that's a six-ton boulder that hits the ground really, really hard," he said, talking about what it was like to literally crash back into our planet. "And it really is like a car crash into a brick wall." His father, the astronaut, was there to greet him, and Garriott learned that it was just as hard getting used to being back on land as it was getting used to being in space. "When I would lie in bed, since the inner ear fluid sloshed to the back, it makes you feel like you're accelerating forward so you feel like you've got the bed spins after a bad night of drinking," he said. This goes on for three days.

In the International Space Station

He and his father talked about what it was like to fly into space. Richard Garriott was the 483rd person to go into space, and to get there he had to spend the majority of this fortune, undergo corrective eye surgery, and fix his fused kidneys and liver hemangioma in order to pass the medical tests. His body is heavily scarred from the procedures. It cost tens of millions of dollars, made from selling over a hundred million games. This is not a man with a lack of will.